I need to push back on one point. If you don't want to block anyone, then fine that's your choice, but while it is true that "even a broken clock is right twice a day", it is also true that despite how a clock can still be useful (being decorative, or a memento holding a past memory), yet it is still useless as a clock, i.e. time-keeping device.
Other people have their particular preferences too, and for those who want their time on the Threadiverse to be enjoyable, and happen to not enjoy arguing with trolls, it makes sense for some people to block Lemmy.ml.
I wanted to clarify since it sounded at first like you were arguing against OP complaining about the whole situation. Sorry if I misunderstood - I guess this whole thread has gotten quite charged so people are on edge as a result.
If only .ml would label itself as explicitly political so that people knew what it was about rather than having to discover it the hard way...
Especially when browsing by All, and all the more so when the default setting of the most popular 3rd party apps actively hides the instance names, on both users and communities, it's really impossible to know unless you go tinkering with those settings to their non-default values.
It is very easy to forget what the experience looks like for a brand-new user of the Fediverse.
Many trolls exist on Lemmy.World but also sth like >90% of the most active communities are there too. People can help spread this around by posting, commenting, and voting in communities based elsewhere across the Threadiverse.
Though OP is correct also that in threads such as this one, oftentimes the most acutely aggressive and adversarial responses come from Hexbear (although not possible in this case since the community is located on an instance that has defederated from it) or from Lemmy.ml - the numeric number of trolls is not necessarily higher but the relative level of enrichment is.
From other comments here, I am piecing together the fact that - probably since instance blocks don't truly exist in Lemmy - the Lemmy side implements these blocks as "community" ones, while the PieFed side either does the same and I simply did not comprehend the difference at the time or else it might use PieFed's instance blocking functionality. Someone on the PieFed side could test this by looking at this OP to see if comments from people on a blocked-by-default instance (Hexbear.net?) are visible, since those would be hidden by an instance block but not a community one.
Either way, having such optional functionality even further strengthens my respect of the .zip pair of instances - those admins seem really on the ball, working hard to truly care for the people who join:-). Lemmy vs. PieFed software seems far less relevant than having such a great admin team vs. not.
Conservatives can be progressive too though - e.g. George Bush, the Republican President of the USA prior to Obama.
And speaking of the USA, the party on the "left", the Democrats, are most definitely liberals, while the party on the "right", the Republicans, are conservatives. One thing that that means is that for most of modern history, there has been no true "left" party, hence most people inside the USA - and by extension, most people on Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, etc. since they got their start and maintain their strongest base in the USA, prior to opening up to an international audience. So to your average Redditor, "left" =~ Democrat = liberal.
And ironically, as horribly incomplete as that statement is, it is still more accurate than what tankies, especially Hexbears, believe. e.g. that Russia, China, and North Korea are somehow "communist", rather than totalitarian dictators under the guise of democracy and capitalism.
And that is why I am saying: they're not left at all. They only claim to be, which does not make it true.
Fwiw I upvoted your earlier comment - I don't have to agree in order to enjoy it - and you had a cake icon displayed at the time. And I never said that it was an insult, that was entirely a self-pwn purely inside your own mind there.
Ah thank you, this is a crucial piece of info that was needed to more properly understand how to interpret the OP. This post would have been better written to not assume that we the reader already knew all of that, but regardless, thank you for filling that in.
Quick tangential question if I may: does PieFed allow the display of downvotes alongside upvotes? I don't mean in the horribly janky tooltip manner I mean like Lemmy does in offering to display an actual number next to but separate from the upvote count? PieFed.social decidedly does not - I've tried every single theme and clicked every setting to no avail there - but is that something that an instance admin can choose to do, without needing to alter the actual code itself to implement that preference? Personally I think that something with 10 upvotes and 9 downvotes is very clearly distinct from something that nobody has even looked at much less interacted with in any capacity, but right now it is exceedingly difficult to tell the two scenarios apart from one another (and sometimes outright impossible for some reason? zooming in as far as humanly possible and tapping quickly 10+ times in succession helps trigger the tooltip ~80% of the time, but not always, while other times it stubbornly refuses to show no matter what).
Begin detailed rant.
The more I learn about things, the more I see that PieFed is "soft-opinionated" in terms of its installation, going far out of its way to allow people to not only opt-out but even have to specifically opt-in to the more controversial aspects it has. Not the vote quota though - that one is opt-out, but still a far cry from being hard-coded as people so often claimed for PieFed features.
And Lemmy is the same way. Virtually the same software that runs Lemmy.ml also runs Lemmy.World. There is a (rather controversial) hidden slur word filter, but iirc that one is opt-in also.
Both software packages break things - Lemmy more often by leaving things broken for half a decade at a time, e.g. why is there no notification sent when someone's content is removed? People even have to find out they they have been banned from an entire instance the hard way!! While PieFed more often by moving forward quickly and disrupting other things in its path, e.g. its form of blocking users from a particular instance does not inform the recipient that their content is being ignored (tbf this is also how Lemmy defederations work as well, so not entirely uniquely a PieFed issue).
And then there is the vote quota: there is still no exposure of that setting to non-admins, right? Like how can a visitor attempting to evaluate an instance even know whether that quota is active or not on a particular instance, or how the setting for the quota on that instance may differ from other instances?
So someone contributing votes to a community housed on a PieFed instance - even if that someone is on an instance running Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, etc. - will have their votes discarded (this I believe is not in question, as people have reported such), but with zero notification of this event, nor is there a quick way for such a user to see in advance whether it is likely to happen? Afaict, the vote quotas are shadow-censoring Lemmy users, without so much as offering a way to tell how much of their daily quota has been used up, or again short of directly asking an admin themselves, how much of a quota an instance is even applying, or like what time of day the quota resets for their instance, or anything like that.
This shadow censorship is what moves PieFed from being merely "soft-opinionated" into enforcing its viewpoints onto the users of other instances. Tbf, Lemmy does similar here too - shadow-censoring whole entire communities that their users are forbidden from being made aware of existence, without exposing these choices, very unlike the defederation lists that are fully public, or the instance-wide user bans that (usually) are shown in the modlog. So now as I see it, both software packages are "hard-opinionated", just in different ways, but both pushing their viewpoints onto people without offering informed consent.
At least they are FOSS, fwiw.
End detailed rant.
Anyway , as a result of all this I now believe that it is the choice of admin that matters far more to an end-user's experience than which software platform someone is running. PieFed offers superior features, and is especially attractive to admins being easier to run (all the more so using the docker container approach), whereas Lemmy offers a far superiorly polished and flexible UI (e.g. my earlier downvote question). Both have MAJOR - even systemic -flaws, but again... it's FOSS, and what software these days does not?
Leftists believe in, well, frankly, leftist policies. The far left believes the most strongly in those policies.
Whereas tankies deny reality itself, choosing to believe in um... "alternative" facts, such as that Ukraine forced Russia to invade it, rather than the other way around.
One might therefore justifiably call them the Alt-Left, similar to the Alt-Right.
And whatever you want to call them, they are both violent extremists who want to see the other side literally killed, and anyone who disagrees even slightly with their viewpoints rounded up to receive pain in return for their wrong-think. Hence the placement on the graph next to one another, since regardless of the term used to describe them, they share far more in common than they differ from one another.
So for example someone who is against genocide wherever it occurs is a far left believer, while someone who claims to believe in leftist principles while actively calling for genocide, but against the oThEr SiDe, is a tankie. And clearly by the very definition of the terms, cannot possibly be an actual leftist.
Their rationale I believe is that society must go through a period of purifying cleansing before it can attain perfection on the other side of that process. But there are several things wrong with that, like for one thing that does not include their "perfect" society where glorious leader most definitely has clothes on, again this only applies to the oThEr SiDe BaD that must undergo this procedure (so Russia, China, and North Korea are fine and never to be criticized, while everything done in a Western culture is by definition bad, even if in other circumstances it would have been considered good, if done by someone else).
Also, by actively rooting for the downfall of Western civilization, this is by definition a genocide - the ending of an entire people group, identity, and way of life (which admittedly has gone more than a little off the rails).
But don't miss how there is never any discussion about what ELSE may lie on the other side of that cleansing purification ritual. Feudalism under the boot heels of tech overlords seems far more likely to me than communism, especially given today's bent of technology. But again, there are not plans to guide anyone through THIS process, almost like the fall of the West - and perhaps the corresponding rise of Russia & China? - are the whole fucking point?
TLDR: extremists on both sides want me dead (tbf I'm collateral damage either way, as each side merely shows off performatively in front of the real audience of their supporting base), and the authoritarian practices of the Alt-Left tankies are really not much different than those of actual Right (Alt- or otherwise) fascists.
But did you notice how irrelephant pointed out that THEY (tankies) should be entirely free to criticize whomever, wherever, however, and at whatever frequency they like...
Whereas in turn you should be allowed the freedom to... STFU about the situation?
It's almost like there's one rule applied to one group, while there is an entirely separate rule differently applied to the other "side"?
Watch Innuendo Studios' The Alt-Right Playbook series (entirely free on YouTube), and you will be very glad that you did. Once you train yourself how to spot these tactics, you will never find yourself arguing with people who user toddler logic again. Ultimately, some people use logic not to arrive at any kind of Truth but instead only as a means to an end, and more often than not as a club to bash their enemies with, which is basically anyone who is vulnerable to such tactics. You cannot stop trolls from doing such, but you can prevent those tactics from working on you.
PieFed allows true instance blocking. Lemmy's "instance block" function is so misleadingly named that it might just qualify as disinformation. While it does hide communities located on that instance, it still allows: users on that instance to see, reply to, and vote (brigade) on your content, and to send you DMs, which originally did not trigger notifications but then the Lemmy devs reversed that to allow these "blocked" users to spam your DMs even while triggering notifications every single time. Which btw I note can last for WEEKS and WEEKS if you make the mistake of saying something remotely controversial (or not supportive enough of their chosen echo chamber talking points).
So PieFed users can do it, while basically nobody else on Lemmy can, at least not very easily (there are some antiquated apps that allowed it, but iirc those have not been updated in years, so then to make it happen you basically have to use the web interface exclusively - which most people dislike for some reason, and then implement a custom uBlock Origin filter code... and even that only hides their comments from your view, while they can still e.g. vote on your content in return).
Actually, now that I think about it, I suppose there is an easy way: simply make a comment that the devs do not like on their instance, and they will quickly ban you from it! That might do the trick, I dunno?
Isn't that only PieFed.zip, but not Lemmy.zip that has the default instance blocks? I am fairly certain that this is the case, but even so could still be wrong:-).
Tangentially, the transparency surrounding this issue is abysmal.
Oh, it is also remotely possible that simply nobody on that instance has signed up to those communities yet - it requires at least one local subscriber to pull in new content.
Another possibility is the admins having blocked the specific communities even if not the entire instance. There is no way to tell which these are, as the Lemmy devs decided to not expose that information to users (fwiw, neither does PieFed).
Tankies will full-on tell you, with a straight face even, that Ukraine forced Russia into invading it. So yeah, I tend not to pay attention to whatever else they say, after having learned that.
They also lie about the existence of "hard-coded" filters in PieFed software, ignoring how they are the absolute best of all possibilities, fully opt-in even - as in not only not hard-coded, but you specifically have to enable it for that code to run. (Meanwhile, Lemmy.ml has an authoritarian slur word filter that censors their own speech - as if that isn't identical in nature to PieFed's censoring?)
PieFed is kinda opinionated though - that much at least is true - though quite possibly less so than Lemmy, especially in terms of what features are available as opt-in vs. unchangeable.
It used to be the case that, aside from hexbear and Lemmygrad (both defederated from on your instance), 90% of the most trolling comments came from Lemmy.ml. However, immediately after Trump won the USA election, I started seeing that behavior all over the place. Perhaps that timing is mere coincidence, but regardless, blocking all users on that instance (which PieFed allows you to do) no longer works to keep the most batshit insane takes from my feed.
Also I have consistently seen people commenting on that instance (and on Lemmygrad) about how proud they are that no does not mean no, but rather that they need to push forward harder - by making alts to mask their associations - and which they readily do.
So I was adding historical context to your statement here: I see what you mean, now, but a couple years ago things were notably different. Then again, obviously not all trolls are the same, and trolls exist everywhere - which I should know, being one myself (as people keep telling me:-).
I notice here the distinction between "haven't" vs. "can't".
Claiming that LLMs can be useful in solving some problems that humans simply haven't bothered to spend time looking at more deeply is one thing, but turning around and using those solutions - which may genuinely be low-key exciting and even useful for some practical purposes - is not the same thing as representing evidence that the LLM has reached AGI status, let alone being up to the "very stable senile genius" level.
Apples to oranges, except I note that where hype was needed for profits, somehow statements that vaguely look correct (if you don't delve too deeply) were found and provided. i.e., LLMs might not have reached the level of intelligence of an actual mathematical genius, senile or otherwise, but perhaps it has reached the intelligence level of an average techbro⁉️ (who again only values the appearance of correctness and doesn't let little things like "facts" get in the way of their statements!)
I need to push back on one point. If you don't want to block anyone, then fine that's your choice, but while it is true that "even a broken clock is right twice a day", it is also true that despite how a clock can still be useful (being decorative, or a memento holding a past memory), yet it is still useless as a clock, i.e. time-keeping device.
Other people have their particular preferences too, and for those who want their time on the Threadiverse to be enjoyable, and happen to not enjoy arguing with trolls, it makes sense for some people to block Lemmy.ml.
I wanted to clarify since it sounded at first like you were arguing against OP complaining about the whole situation. Sorry if I misunderstood - I guess this whole thread has gotten quite charged so people are on edge as a result.
If only .ml would label itself as explicitly political so that people knew what it was about rather than having to discover it the hard way...
Especially when browsing by All, and all the more so when the default setting of the most popular 3rd party apps actively hides the instance names, on both users and communities, it's really impossible to know unless you go tinkering with those settings to their non-default values.
It is very easy to forget what the experience looks like for a brand-new user of the Fediverse.
I feel really conflicted about whether to upvote this comment or not...
(Whatever will Palantir think of me⁉️)
Fwiw Lemmy.World has >6-fold more users on it than the 2nd-largest Lemmy instance. https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list
The Fediverse is shrinking https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=48.
And people cite how it is our toxicity that pushes them away. https://www.reddit.com/r/fossdroid/comments/1uiywal/should_we_switch_to_lemmy/.
Many trolls exist on Lemmy.World but also sth like >90% of the most active communities are there too. People can help spread this around by posting, commenting, and voting in communities based elsewhere across the Threadiverse.
Though OP is correct also that in threads such as this one, oftentimes the most acutely aggressive and adversarial responses come from Hexbear (although not possible in this case since the community is located on an instance that has defederated from it) or from Lemmy.ml - the numeric number of trolls is not necessarily higher but the relative level of enrichment is.
Oh that's really neat, thanks for sharing!!:-)
From other comments here, I am piecing together the fact that - probably since instance blocks don't truly exist in Lemmy - the Lemmy side implements these blocks as "community" ones, while the PieFed side either does the same and I simply did not comprehend the difference at the time or else it might use PieFed's instance blocking functionality. Someone on the PieFed side could test this by looking at this OP to see if comments from people on a blocked-by-default instance (Hexbear.net?) are visible, since those would be hidden by an instance block but not a community one.
Either way, having such optional functionality even further strengthens my respect of the .zip pair of instances - those admins seem really on the ball, working hard to truly care for the people who join:-). Lemmy vs. PieFed software seems far less relevant than having such a great admin team vs. not.
Conservatives can be progressive too though - e.g. George Bush, the Republican President of the USA prior to Obama.
And speaking of the USA, the party on the "left", the Democrats, are most definitely liberals, while the party on the "right", the Republicans, are conservatives. One thing that that means is that for most of modern history, there has been no true "left" party, hence most people inside the USA - and by extension, most people on Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, etc. since they got their start and maintain their strongest base in the USA, prior to opening up to an international audience. So to your average Redditor, "left" =~ Democrat = liberal.
And ironically, as horribly incomplete as that statement is, it is still more accurate than what tankies, especially Hexbears, believe. e.g. that Russia, China, and North Korea are somehow "communist", rather than totalitarian dictators under the guise of democracy and capitalism.
And that is why I am saying: they're not left at all. They only claim to be, which does not make it true.
Fwiw I upvoted your earlier comment - I don't have to agree in order to enjoy it - and you had a cake icon displayed at the time. And I never said that it was an insult, that was entirely a self-pwn purely inside your own mind there.
I just realized that I should have asked, are you perhaps... wait for it... wait... okay here goes noting at all, for no reason at all: 6-7?
In that case I'll repeat myself here as well😃:
Quick tangential question if I may: does PieFed allow the display of downvotes alongside upvotes? I don't mean in the horribly janky tooltip manner I mean like Lemmy does in offering to display an actual number next to but separate from the upvote count? PieFed.social decidedly does not - I've tried every single theme and clicked every setting to no avail there - but is that something that an instance admin can choose to do, without needing to alter the actual code itself to implement that preference? Personally I think that something with 10 upvotes and 9 downvotes is very clearly distinct from something that nobody has even looked at much less interacted with in any capacity, but right now it is exceedingly difficult to tell the two scenarios apart from one another (and sometimes outright impossible for some reason? zooming in as far as humanly possible and tapping quickly 10+ times in succession helps trigger the tooltip ~80% of the time, but not always, while other times it stubbornly refuses to show no matter what).
Begin detailed rant.
The more I learn about things, the more I see that PieFed is "soft-opinionated" in terms of its installation, going far out of its way to allow people to not only opt-out but even have to specifically opt-in to the more controversial aspects it has. Not the vote quota though - that one is opt-out, but still a far cry from being hard-coded as people so often claimed for PieFed features.
And Lemmy is the same way. Virtually the same software that runs Lemmy.ml also runs Lemmy.World. There is a (rather controversial) hidden slur word filter, but iirc that one is opt-in also.
Both software packages break things - Lemmy more often by leaving things broken for half a decade at a time, e.g. why is there no notification sent when someone's content is removed? People even have to find out they they have been banned from an entire instance the hard way!! While PieFed more often by moving forward quickly and disrupting other things in its path, e.g. its form of blocking users from a particular instance does not inform the recipient that their content is being ignored (tbf this is also how Lemmy defederations work as well, so not entirely uniquely a PieFed issue).
And then there is the vote quota: there is still no exposure of that setting to non-admins, right? Like how can a visitor attempting to evaluate an instance even know whether that quota is active or not on a particular instance, or how the setting for the quota on that instance may differ from other instances?
So someone contributing votes to a community housed on a PieFed instance - even if that someone is on an instance running Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, etc. - will have their votes discarded (this I believe is not in question, as people have reported such), but with zero notification of this event, nor is there a quick way for such a user to see in advance whether it is likely to happen? Afaict, the vote quotas are shadow-censoring Lemmy users, without so much as offering a way to tell how much of their daily quota has been used up, or again short of directly asking an admin themselves, how much of a quota an instance is even applying, or like what time of day the quota resets for their instance, or anything like that.
This shadow censorship is what moves PieFed from being merely "soft-opinionated" into enforcing its viewpoints onto the users of other instances. Tbf, Lemmy does similar here too - shadow-censoring whole entire communities that their users are forbidden from being made aware of existence, without exposing these choices, very unlike the defederation lists that are fully public, or the instance-wide user bans that (usually) are shown in the modlog. So now as I see it, both software packages are "hard-opinionated", just in different ways, but both pushing their viewpoints onto people without offering informed consent.
At least they are FOSS, fwiw.
End detailed rant.
Anyway , as a result of all this I now believe that it is the choice of admin that matters far more to an end-user's experience than which software platform someone is running. PieFed offers superior features, and is especially attractive to admins being easier to run (all the more so using the docker container approach), whereas Lemmy offers a far superiorly polished and flexible UI (e.g. my earlier downvote question). Both have MAJOR - even systemic -flaws, but again... it's FOSS, and what software these days does not?
Leftists believe in, well, frankly, leftist policies. The far left believes the most strongly in those policies.
Whereas tankies deny reality itself, choosing to believe in um... "alternative" facts, such as that Ukraine forced Russia to invade it, rather than the other way around.
One might therefore justifiably call them the Alt-Left, similar to the Alt-Right.
And whatever you want to call them, they are both violent extremists who want to see the other side literally killed, and anyone who disagrees even slightly with their viewpoints rounded up to receive pain in return for their wrong-think. Hence the placement on the graph next to one another, since regardless of the term used to describe them, they share far more in common than they differ from one another.
So for example someone who is against genocide wherever it occurs is a far left believer, while someone who claims to believe in leftist principles while actively calling for genocide, but against the oThEr SiDe, is a tankie. And clearly by the very definition of the terms, cannot possibly be an actual leftist.
Their rationale I believe is that society must go through a period of purifying cleansing before it can attain perfection on the other side of that process. But there are several things wrong with that, like for one thing that does not include their "perfect" society where glorious leader most definitely has clothes on, again this only applies to the oThEr SiDe BaD that must undergo this procedure (so Russia, China, and North Korea are fine and never to be criticized, while everything done in a Western culture is by definition bad, even if in other circumstances it would have been considered good, if done by someone else).
Also, by actively rooting for the downfall of Western civilization, this is by definition a genocide - the ending of an entire people group, identity, and way of life (which admittedly has gone more than a little off the rails).
But don't miss how there is never any discussion about what ELSE may lie on the other side of that cleansing purification ritual. Feudalism under the boot heels of tech overlords seems far more likely to me than communism, especially given today's bent of technology. But again, there are not plans to guide anyone through THIS process, almost like the fall of the West - and perhaps the corresponding rise of Russia & China? - are the whole fucking point?
TLDR: extremists on both sides want me dead (tbf I'm collateral damage either way, as each side merely shows off performatively in front of the real audience of their supporting base), and the authoritarian practices of the Alt-Left tankies are really not much different than those of actual Right (Alt- or otherwise) fascists.
Kudos to an entertaining reply.
Happy coming out day! 🥳
But did you notice how irrelephant pointed out that THEY (tankies) should be entirely free to criticize whomever, wherever, however, and at whatever frequency they like...
Whereas in turn you should be allowed the freedom to... STFU about the situation?
It's almost like there's one rule applied to one group, while there is an entirely separate rule differently applied to the other "side"?
Watch Innuendo Studios' The Alt-Right Playbook series (entirely free on YouTube), and you will be very glad that you did. Once you train yourself how to spot these tactics, you will never find yourself arguing with people who user toddler logic again. Ultimately, some people use logic not to arrive at any kind of Truth but instead only as a means to an end, and more often than not as a club to bash their enemies with, which is basically anyone who is vulnerable to such tactics. You cannot stop trolls from doing such, but you can prevent those tactics from working on you.
PieFed allows true instance blocking. Lemmy's "instance block" function is so misleadingly named that it might just qualify as disinformation. While it does hide communities located on that instance, it still allows: users on that instance to see, reply to, and vote (brigade) on your content, and to send you DMs, which originally did not trigger notifications but then the Lemmy devs reversed that to allow these "blocked" users to spam your DMs even while triggering notifications every single time. Which btw I note can last for WEEKS and WEEKS if you make the mistake of saying something remotely controversial (or not supportive enough of their chosen echo chamber talking points).
So PieFed users can do it, while basically nobody else on Lemmy can, at least not very easily (there are some antiquated apps that allowed it, but iirc those have not been updated in years, so then to make it happen you basically have to use the web interface exclusively - which most people dislike for some reason, and then implement a custom uBlock Origin filter code... and even that only hides their comments from your view, while they can still e.g. vote on your content in return).
Actually, now that I think about it, I suppose there is an easy way: simply make a comment that the devs do not like on their instance, and they will quickly ban you from it! That might do the trick, I dunno?
Isn't that only PieFed.zip, but not Lemmy.zip that has the default instance blocks? I am fairly certain that this is the case, but even so could still be wrong:-).
Tangentially, the transparency surrounding this issue is abysmal.
Oh, it is also remotely possible that simply nobody on that instance has signed up to those communities yet - it requires at least one local subscriber to pull in new content.
Another possibility is the admins having blocked the specific communities even if not the entire instance. There is no way to tell which these are, as the Lemmy devs decided to not expose that information to users (fwiw, neither does PieFed).
Tankies will full-on tell you, with a straight face even, that Ukraine forced Russia into invading it. So yeah, I tend not to pay attention to whatever else they say, after having learned that.
They also lie about the existence of "hard-coded" filters in PieFed software, ignoring how they are the absolute best of all possibilities, fully opt-in even - as in not only not hard-coded, but you specifically have to enable it for that code to run. (Meanwhile, Lemmy.ml has an authoritarian slur word filter that censors their own speech - as if that isn't identical in nature to PieFed's censoring?)
PieFed is kinda opinionated though - that much at least is true - though quite possibly less so than Lemmy, especially in terms of what features are available as opt-in vs. unchangeable.
More details in Rimu's own words at https://join.piefed.social/2026/08/04/anti-fascist-piefed-features/.
It used to be the case that, aside from hexbear and Lemmygrad (both defederated from on your instance), 90% of the most trolling comments came from Lemmy.ml. However, immediately after Trump won the USA election, I started seeing that behavior all over the place. Perhaps that timing is mere coincidence, but regardless, blocking all users on that instance (which PieFed allows you to do) no longer works to keep the most batshit insane takes from my feed.
Also I have consistently seen people commenting on that instance (and on Lemmygrad) about how proud they are that no does not mean no, but rather that they need to push forward harder - by making alts to mask their associations - and which they readily do.
So I was adding historical context to your statement here: I see what you mean, now, but a couple years ago things were notably different. Then again, obviously not all trolls are the same, and trolls exist everywhere - which I should know, being one myself (as people keep telling me:-).
Actually... both halves do? 🤪
Techbros always exaggerate the claims.
I notice here the distinction between "haven't" vs. "can't".
Claiming that LLMs can be useful in solving some problems that humans simply haven't bothered to spend time looking at more deeply is one thing, but turning around and using those solutions - which may genuinely be low-key exciting and even useful for some practical purposes - is not the same thing as representing evidence that the LLM has reached AGI status, let alone being up to the "
very stablesenile genius" level.Apples to oranges, except I note that where hype was needed for profits, somehow statements that vaguely look correct (if you don't delve too deeply) were found and provided. i.e., LLMs might not have reached the level of intelligence of an actual mathematical genius, senile or otherwise, but perhaps it has reached the intelligence level of an average techbro⁉️ (who again only values the appearance of correctness and doesn't let little things like "facts" get in the way of their statements!)
Naw this is from her OnlyFans. 🤪 (Or maybe his?) /s